2 out of 4 stars
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In Becoming the Dragon by Alex Sapegin, we meet Andy- a young kid who has a freak accident and suddenly has a small supernatural power. His father is working on creating a time portal that Andy initially is sucked into - throwing him into a different world where he has to learn to survive.
The book starts off confusing- as we aren’t given any last names to any of the characters and at least two characters have names that are so similar, at times it gets confusing to tell them apart. I found myself flipping back and forth several times to figure out if the characters were talking about the dad or the daughter. While I understand this is a common trait in Russia, the names were just to similar for novel format.
As well as, there was very little exposition that mattered. The story went right into the father completing experiments without ever really explaining what was happening. Between that and the name issue, it was a bit hard to keep up with the plot. Andy was sucked into the portal before I even realized that was what the dad was working on and it wasn’t a roleplay game between the daughter and her friends. Yet, at the same time, the author spent several pages describing animals wanting to eat Andy once he was in the new world, which I found boring and would’ve rather had more exposition in the moment Andy was sucked into the portal
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The transition between scenes was also confusing at first. Again, without any exposition the story switched locations frequently without warning - just a simple sub title that offered little help. Often times, when switching back to Andy’s journey through the ‘new’ world the titles didn’t make sense and I eventually stopped paying attention to them. They offered nothing for the story and at the very beginning, made the transitions even more confusing.
I also found that there were so many breaks between POV’s that it threw the whole story off. If the author had just stuck to Andy’s POV and perhaps included the father here and there, but the rest I found unnecessary and, once again, boring in some cases.
The entire book is told in past tense, stream of conscious thought. This style didn’t suite the book much at all and took away from the story. I felt like because of this, the author often skipped over some of the most important parts of the novel and spends too much time on things that aren’t so important and some writing ends up confusing. In one scene toward the very end of the book, Andy is knocked out kind of, and the book spends several pages in italicized, drug-hazed stream of conscious thoughts before switching POV’s and continuing on with the story. This part was one of the hardest to read through and didn’t make much sense at all, distracting once again from the plot itself.
I think the concept of the book lends itself to greatness, but the idea just didn’t stand up for me and I found myself struggling to complete the story. It lacked a lot of the action that usually comes with fantasy and lent its most important storytelling to the unimportant pieces of the story, distracting from the plot. Because of this fact, I’m giving the book a 2 out of 4 stars.
This book may be interesting for middle school students and incoming high school students who are just getting into reading and enjoy that style of writing, but I don’t think that typical, die-hard fantasy and sci-fi lovers would enjoy this book much.
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Becoming the Dragon
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